Rusch, Kristine Kathryn - Diving Universe SS3 (13 page)

But, over the years, he had learned that startling announcements were often diversionary tactics, to make a questioner forget his line of questioning. He had asked Salvino if she was going to steal the artifacts from this area, just before she had said she was going to prevent a robbery. She hadn't answered his first question. So he decided against pursuing that tack and went for the other.

“I checked you out,” he said, not adding that he had done it as best he could in a limited amount of time. “You're a cave diver, not a police officer.”

“Technically, I'm neither.” Salvino stepped out of the suit. It crumpled against the ground. The water dripping off it made a little trail back to the pool.

Then she opened her pack. She slid her hand inside, grasped a seam, and peeled it back.

Meklos cursed. How had he missed that? Not once, but twice.

She glanced at him. “You couldn't have found it without very specialized equipment,” she said as if she were reading his thoughts. “It's keyed to my DNA, and my DNA only. That's why I wasn't worried about leaving the pack behind. You'd never find this pouch and if you miraculously did, you'd never open it.”

He pressed his lips together. He didn't believe in never. He would have gotten it open, eventually.

She slipped her hand into the pouch and pulled something out. It was some kind of data on a drive as thin as a fingernail. She handed it to him, but he didn't have a scanner on him.

“What this will tell you,” she said, “is that I'm Navi Salvino of the Interagency Arts and Monuments Protection League. We're a squad of investigators authorized by various governments, including the Unified Governments of Amnthra, to protect historic sites and properties throughout the sector. If we do find a problem, we turn that problem over to the enforcement arm best equipped to handle it.”

He slipped the small dataport into a pocket of his shirt and sealed the pocket. He'd heard of the Interagency Arts and Monuments Protection League mostly by its acronym IAMPL. In the last decade, they'd stopped some spectacular thefts throughout the sector. But that didn't mean she was a legitimate part of the organization. Only that she had heard of it, along with everyone else in the sector.

“Dr. Reese has a fantastic reputation,” Meklos said.

“I'm sure you noted that when you decided to take this job,” Salvino said. “You probably also noted that she had a significant amount of money in various accounts.”

He had. He hadn't thought much of it. She was an in-demand expert in her field, a woman who commanded high prices for almost anything she did.

“That wasn't my concern.”

“It was ours.” Salvino pulled the thin heating blanket from her pack. She flapped the blanket open, then wrapped it around herself. “No matter how well known they are, people in Dr. Reese's position don't make a great deal of money. Everything they do is paid for. The Scholars funded this expedition, and will continue to fund it for all the years of its lifetime. They funded her previous expeditions as well.”

“So?” Meklos was getting cold. He'd run around a great deal since the sirens went off, sweating through his clothes. Now the clammy material was starting to freeze. “That proves nothing.”

“In and of itself, you're right.” Salvino pushed her hair out of her face. Her hand was trembling. “But we also found a lot of small items with dubious provenance that we could later trace back to her earlier digs. At some point, she takes items from her sites and sends them through a series of dealers. She sells these small items to private buyers for a great deal of money.”

“I don't know how she could,” Meklos said. “This dig is well known.”

But as he spoke, he understood. The dig was well known, but the location of the so-called museum wasn't. If the caverns were as billed, then Dr. Reese could have taken items from here before they were ever recorded. They would have been deemed lost, if their existence was even known.

She hadn't told him about the caverns. She didn't want her assistants down here. From Chavo's reaction, he hadn't known about the cavern, either.

She had been keeping secrets.

Too many of them.

“You're beginning to understand,” Salvino said.

“Or you're lying to me to cover up your own plan.”

She sighed. “My plan was simple. I wanted to get into this dig to see if there were valuables to loot. The cave diving was a gift. Then we were able to map the caverns, and—”

“How did you map the caverns?” he asked. “Dr. Reese didn't.”

“Dr. Reese was afraid of her site,” Salvino said. “She didn't want to use equipment because of the Spires.”

“You believe that?” he asked. It could have been a good excuse to keep everyone else from finding the caverns below.

“Yes, I believe that,” Salvino said. She picked up her suit, folded it, and shoved it into her pack. “All the scientists worried that the Spires were too fragile to handle much of anything.”

He had seen that in some of his research.

“We decided to try scanning from the ground, just outside the secure zone. But we were looking for the caverns.” Salvino picked up the other pack. The blanket started to slide off her shoulders. “No one else ever did.”

Meklos put the blanket around her, then took both packs. “How did you know about the caverns?” he asked.

“We didn't. But when I realized we were going to see the Spires, I hired an expert, a man by the name of Zeigler—”

“I've heard of him,” Meklos said.

She gave Meklos a measuring look. “Then you know why I trusted his instinct. It turned out to be right.”

Meklos nodded. He would check Salvino out, but her explanations made a lot of sense.

“Lying about your cave diving experience could have killed you,” he said.

She shook her head. “Nothing in my information packet was a lie. I've dived a lot, mostly on jobs like this. You'd be surprised how many ancient cities are flooded.”

“Nothing was a lie,” he repeated. “But you left out a lot.”

“I erased everything that was important, figuring no one would bother to check. I was right.”

His cheeks warmed. “I checked,” he said. “But the equipment here—”

“Worked to my advantage,” she said. Her teeth were chattering.

“What's your plan now?” he asked. “Go to the surface and arrest Dr. Reese?”

“No,” Salvino said. “There's no reason. The caverns are empty.”

“So you say,” Meklos said. “There's no way to check. For all I know, your companion is taking valuables out now.”

“I'll let you check our ship,” she said. “You can examine everything we have.”

He gave her a measuring look. She seemed truthful, but he had no real way to know. Although deep down, he trusted her. And he had never trusted Dr. Reese.

* * * *

38

As they climbed the stairs, Meklos explained what had happened above ground to Navi. He explained his defense system theory.

It made sense. It made her disappointment fade.

She had wanted to see the museum. But that didn't exist—or no longer existed, at least not here. The defense system was almost as good, maybe better, since it probably had applications in the modern era.

And it would prevent Gabrielle Reese from robbing this place blind. Because she wouldn't be in charge any longer.

The Scholars got most of their funding from government grants from all over the sector. Various governments would want to know how this defense system worked. They'd bid for the rights to study it.

This entire place would become famous. Dr. Reese wouldn't have untrammeled access any longer. They had nearly reached the top of the stairs when Navi put her hand on Meklos's arm.

“Check me out,” she said. “As soon as we get to the surface. If what you say is true, then you can use proper communications equipment right from the city and it won't cause any harm. With a more powerful system, you'll see my bio, even without the disk I gave you. You'll find it all.”

He stopped beside her, moving the packs to one hand. “Why should I do that?”

“Because we're going to hire you. You'll guard this place for us until we can bring in reinforcements and take control from Dr. Reese.”

“She found this place. By your own admission, she hasn't done anything,” he said. “You were right. There is no reason to take her off the dig.”

Navi smiled. “I'm glad you understand. She truly is a gifted expert in her field. She should be allowed to stay. But you need to make sure everything else stays as well.”

He grunted, which she took as an assent. Although she wasn't sure.

She climbed the remaining steps into the building. People combed the walls, scanning everything. The site looked completely different than it had in the morning.

“Are there really caves down there?” one of the graduate students asked her.

The kid was so excited he apparently didn't notice the white all over her clothing or the blanket around her shoulders. Or the way her teeth were chattering.

“I'm not at liberty to say,” Navi said. She let Meklos lead her into the sunshine.

The warm sunshine that seemed to have a life of its own. It undulated like water toward the building that Gabrielle Reese had called the temple.

Clearly it wasn't a temple at all, but some kind of central control station.

“You want to see it?” Meklos asked her.

Navi nodded. She wanted to see it, then she wanted to go back to the building she'd been staying in. She wanted to sit alone in the darkness and shake.

She wanted a few minutes to let the fear ease away before she had to be completely professional again.

* * * *

39

The light was almost to the end of the Spires now. Gabrielle studied the light moving through the two-dimensional drawing as if it were alive and about to attack. A few of her team had gathered around as well, asking questions that she mostly ignored.

Then Meklos came inside. People parted from him as if he were going to harm them. He had a woman with him, and it took Gabrielle a moment to realize it was one of the divers.

“What did you find?” she asked, barely able to control her excitement. The museum? Treasures? She wasn't sure she could hide any of it now, but that mattered less than the fact of the artifacts. She wanted to see the famous Spoils of War Museum that the Denonites had created.

“Nothing,” the woman said. She sounded tired.

“It's a long story,” Meklos said. Obviously, he already knew what the story was.

Gabrielle glared at him. He was still getting in her way.

But he didn't seem to notice her glare. Instead, he was staring at the drawing.

“This is brilliant,” he said to the diver. “This is how the Denonites protected themselves against siege. Those passages below had to have once been easily visible from the ground. The Denonites built this so that they could track anyone entering.”

“And prevent them from coming into the city with those barriers,” the diver said.

“What barriers?” Gabrielle asked.

But they ignored her. She wasn't used to being ignored.

She was about to ask the question again, when the light moved to the last part of a Spire. It flickered for a moment, and then disappeared. There was a grinding above her. The ceiling closed. The lights were gone.

“What was that?” she asked.

But she didn't expect anyone to answer her, so she hurried outside. The light no longer flowed down from the Spires.

The city looked normal—as normal as it had before the sirens had gone off. The defense system had shut down, but she didn't know why. She was beginning to think she didn't know anything.

She was torn between awe at the system she'd seen and a disconcerting sense of unease, as if life as she had known it had suddenly and irrevocably changed.

* * * *

40

“He got out,” Navi said softly. “He got out.”

She felt more relief than she'd expected to.

“I'll give him a few minutes, and then contact the ship.”

She looked at Meklos.

“I can't believe he got out.”

Meklos smiled. He seemed calmer, too. “He got out and the system shut off. This thing is brilliant. The threat is gone, so the entire system is back in wait mode.”

“We're going to be studying this for a long time,” Navi said. “Will you help?”

“When everything checks out,” Meklos said.

She nodded. She understood that. She took her pack from Meklos, dug into the pouch, and grabbed her communicator. Damn, it was nice to use a powerful system again. She held it up to him. His smile widened.

She walked to the door. Gabrielle Reese was sitting on the stairs outside, looking lost. And she had lost. The woman was smart enough to know that the change in the Spires made the dig something completely different.

Oddly, Navi wanted to comfort her, to tell her that what she would lose financially, she would gain in reputation. Gabrielle Reese would forever be the woman who'd discovered the long-lost technology of the Denonites.